The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (11 page)

There is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound. (same thing). Gestures: Who killed Cock Robin? The End. A particular buttressing of the body. No Smoking In This Room. All the senses interpenetrate. This spectacle is no more than we can assimilate. Nothing is left to do. For example, the war between men and women. Here is a whole collection of ritual. In fact everything is calculated with an enchanting mathematical meticulousness. Senses crackling everywhere resounding as if from an immense dripping rainforest. The day’s emotion and turmoil is present in the dusty grassy ground. Tied naked to a huge oak. The sort of theatrical language foreign to every tongue. To track the beats down. There is a sensual delight the braincells take. Thank you Brett. Clothed in strangest dress. To learn to keep quiet when another man’s prisoner. Complaints in the night. The kind of irritation caused by the impossibility of finding thread. The plastic requirements of this stage: food clothing shelter sex drugs jail. Ear to the ground. as if through channels hollowed out in the mind itself. Pages in Berlitz. No one here but me. Queer dawns voices a thousand eyes complaints in the night. To know to know everything. My eyes are tired. (the echo). (Jesse James).

Woke up this morning you were other people in absentia lovely fashions On my mind. Take a good look. Shit little turd balls! I’ve got troubles: You have been sentenced to death sketches I havent explained actually I have Been many days writing the same work, waiting, no one there, The Ancient City all around you, thru August, nightmares, put them into a box, Anger gives me nausea and I said shee-it! went home resplendent with defeat. Baby-things. Future issues many thanks for them last night The Thing A great movie: Hit The Trail. Utterly exhausted by maniacs including Yours truly not to mention shifts, day shift night shift etc. took it to Cut City and one Ted reading in California She having gone back to Tappan (to picket Ben Jonson). How’s the chickens, the ducks, the old old ass? Please keep in touch Just figured out I cant stand writing in this box words dismantled to keep together and there are other problems and they come together at my mind. Furtive Days. It gets you down and out you go Dont read this part you both Nearly get killed on the freeway. Remember? How long do you think you’ll Be? That old praise (up the butt!) not likely put the books back nights    Flight 9 American Air Lines best to use your own name. You have been sentenced to Death.

FOR DICK GALLUP

You’re listening to a man who in 1964 unknowingly

breathed in a small quantity of

LSD
powder, remember the fragrance of Grandma’s

Kitchen?—and at a college he reads, sleeps.

The next morning he

takes a walk around the campus

with a young student who is

ordinarily mild-mannered and agreeable

and secretly thinks of himself

as rather colorless and uninteresting.

He has written poems for years,

odd sensation indeed, only partly alleviated

when he learns that he is next door to

the bashed-out windows, is now

engaged in beating in the

top of a car with the inaccurate

ones relieving him. He learns to

time his words and lines to the

hammer-strokes, and before long

he is giving something. And the

grave, slightly puzzled sympathetic

faces take on expressions he is

grateful for.

The head picks up. He is taken

to a room in one of the girls’

dormitories, which gives him

a local airline. This is a

girls’ college, also

far off in the country. He finds

this out by the use of drugs outside

medical auspices. He and his

followers seem to feel

that the end justifies the means, but

they have no flair (!), and at that moment

the image of his great predecessor,

the only predecessor, Laurence Sterne,

and everything that came into his

head insulted somebody—merciful

heavens, who on earth was it?—and

what the hell, he thinks, this may be

a major technical breakthrough for me.

In that company he thinks he hears a bearded

fellow mutter something discontented about

“a lack of fire” or was he a

singer, an American poet? When at last

he reaches the station he discovers

he is too early by 20 minutes

blazes up humiliatingly in the front

of his brain. The result of this was

that he deliberately drank twice as

there are few lights on the campus, remember

Grandma’s kitchen?, and he is uncertain about the

instructions designed to get him into

Literary Vaudeville. At the outset of the

trip he had thought that

the songs themselves would be enough

so had a terrible hangover the next day.

Yet he has in some obscure way

been a good deal better satisfied with

powerful vagueness. Poetry. A car

stops. It is driven

by a student at the college

he is going to, and, ever cognizant

of his bodiless staring audience, and of

the skull beneath his own skin

he has taken to doing some curious

things. For example he has acquired a

guitar, which he carries about with

Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas; he has

had nothing to complain of as to

the size and response of his audience on

this tour—set up by the editor of a venerable

poetry magazine—has dinner

with them, recounts some of his

adventures. Everyone from the schools.

But he is still bothered by the

difference and the inevitability of

death. He has tried for years to

formulate his relationship to these

things and to say something about

how to get to bus and train stations

and airports. He keeps opening

his eyes in his sleep—for what he

has become on this trip bears but little relation

to the self he left

at home in the mind, say, of his wife.

He is, in fact, in the middle of

a tour of readings. So far, considering,

he is not looking forward to acquiring

the courage to get drunk
before

readings. He is exhausted and exalted

as he has never been, and now, standing

here, these affairs may be mandatory (in

some cases.) Then too many of the schools

like this one, though far back, seemed pleased by

the way things have gone; there have

even been some letters of appreciation,

female voices. There are many

furtive amused glances at him and

he replies in kind but because he liked

to write them, but he has never thought

of them as participating in

a public act, a kind

appeal to girls, and he even

entertains the idea of sneaking

back to his room and dashing

hard on his nerves. He might live

more vividly in this condition

but he cannot write in it.

He is happy and grinning; he feels

resourceful, foolish, and

lucky. “America,” he says aloud

about this. He takes out his two

volumes of poetry, and his

manuscript for a third book,

his
Memento Mori
, the great themes

of poetry hit him squarely: the

possibility of love in

these students just coming from

the auditorium sees him approaching

with his ragged books

in the center of a new reality—in

this case a cold sleepless room—

he looks at these things from the last

girl’s unexpected kiss, the student

with the nine pound hammer—he

rearranges his evening’s program

around the themes of love and

death, dangerous to the psychological

stability he expects of himself.

He has several misadventures to

lance between what is on the

page, put there by him at odd

beyond-himself moments, and . . .

and the faces. In the middle

guise of fiction, he becomes fascinatingly

alive, living up to the

“giving-them-what-they-want,” or might

be expected to feel entitled to

from a poet, beside himself, who

has drunk very much at six or eight

schools before that one part.

Intensity, he murmurs, where have

you been all my life.

He settles down for a sleep

with a young professor who

writes poems and is enthusiastic

and companionable. He

reads, has a drink at an untidy

bundle of railroads, bus, and airline schedules

marked with a red pencil and

various notes to himself. That

such nervous excitement, such

over-responsiveness to people

is probably the poet’s sole

evening repast, and if he

tasted of a wild boar or a stag

which he had roasted in the

cold light coming in from the chapel

tower across the campus, well, remember

the fragrance? There is

only one bus out of town,

he reaches for it, rock-and-roll

music bursts in his face. Rather than

fool with trying to shut it off he pulls

out his manuscripts. One whispers to

another. Though he is a little

afraid to, he admits who he is,

alone in a room with his skull.

In
this
reading, for once in his

life, he feels a correct balance

in his Hamlet, lost somewhere in

the snows of Northern Wisconsin:

he is, eternal strangeness!, a wandering

pose, full of life through thick

glasses. He finishes, stands

glaring for a moment in another

world with fatigue, one who has spent the most

satisfying part of a long tripping

movement that is not really for him, no, it is

for an exhausted hammerer, or for a new

arrival home and he is more

than a little glad of that: they are

wearing out the plug, feeling that he

has had his revenge. He turns on

the light and dresses, not quite able

to stall, asks suddenly, “May I

kiss you?” She agrees without thinking and

she does so with a distinct sense of

quitting while he is ahead. The

applause is long and loud, as if he were

a Beatle. He reaches a stage,

mounts, looks at the last of all clocks,

and leaves. It is 5:15 a.m. It is

time. He gets up out of bed and stumbles just

as he steps down from the stage into a

wave of feathery sweatered girls, a memorable

thing. No doubt. He gives the best reading of his

life, one that will shortly thereafter

have entered a twilight state characterized

by fantastic imagery. He subs a condition

of character and environment in order to

produce alternative modes of behavior.

He sits down, closes his eyes. Time is

annihilated; the bus driver stumbles

aboard, opens a door to a bridge. Finally

someone stops him, a farmer, and takes him 20

miles down the road. The farmer turns off

the highway, one is much interested in his

being there walking across the campus.

He hears a loud gust of many grunts, a crowd

of muffled students cheers him on; it

is fun in the country and there is

nothing to do. Still he is pleasantly

gratified at the turnouts and at the time,

picks up his bags and manuscripts and

his symbolic white guitar, and goes out

into the white darkness.

What is his life like? Where will he die?

Who is this nun giving him a calm

sense of proportion? and who leaves him; and

this time he is really in a

deserted landscape with dead corn in the

building and no one knows him—

“Come home.” And who is that thin

serious boy with the crewcut?

In a station wagon they drive together

40 miles into the rainforests. He is

given a room in a cavern, and

gifts; disturbing gifts, perhaps inept

inadequate gifts, but gifts just the

same. He feels that he is overcome.

He is middle-aged, beginning to lose

teeth and hair. He is lishing them

in his mind, down steps.

The next morning he catches a strange

madness; took hold of him first at the

reading when he discovered that

everything he said was being noted and

commented upon. Too, it is a midwinter

night in the midwest, and a man is

lying alone in a sterling ardor.

The next place is a branch of a state

of mind located in the fields in an

inept scarecrow’s life. A few big birds

puff and hunch on the telephone wires;

a strange room. On the dresser beside

the complicated clock-radio that

is supposed to wake him on time, there is

an industrial district of a large city.

There he is to be met at the bus station

though it is plain that there is no other

human being in those streets. In a bar,

(ah yes, he needs a drink badly), on

the stairs of a bus, he collapses.

When he wakes up the bus is in

the terminal of the next city. He gets

a small dose, about one-thousandth

the size of an aspirin, and the notoriety

is definitely agreeable and

he does his best to try to live up to it.

What in fact is his problem? A friend

will drive him to the next

engagement which is

his last. They start out and he pays

and gets out, scarcely knowing what he is